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Maxis Announces Second SimCity Beta Weekend

Get ready for another whirlwind day of building and destroying your virtual cities.

Reaction to SimCity has been somewhat...mixed, shall we say? Plenty of people who've been exposed to the game have good things to say about the actual gameplay, but try as they might, Maxis and EA can't quite get away from the firestorm that requiring a constant internet connection generated in many PC gamers. We won't be able to fully judge the game until it's released, of course, but in the meantime, if you're interested in getting your hands on a slice of gameplay a bit early, Maxis has announced a second beta that'll be coming down the pipe on February 16th. Read on for details.

First off, if you want to get your shot at the beta, you'll need to register well in advance at simcity.com/beta; get your details in by Monday morning at 6 AM PST. (If you already registered for the previous beta, no need to apply again.) This is a limited beta, so not everyone that applies will be able to log into the servers. If you do manage to get in, though, you'll be able to play for a 24-hour period starting on Saturday, February 16 at 6 AM. It's important to note that this is the same build of the game as in the previous beta event, meaning that you'll have the same tutorial and the one-hour play limit that you did before, and you'll be restricted to medium-sized cities. We're told that server outages occurred somewhat often during the first weekend, but Maxis reports that they've added more server capacity this time around. That said, this is still a beta that's intended to stress those servers, so you can likely expect some hiccups with your connection.

If you did play the first beta, you'll apparently notice improvements in the game when they use the zoning and road tools, alongside the hundreds of bug-fixes as well." So it sounds like it should be a bit smoother than the first beta event. If you played that, what did you think? Anything especially off-putting about the first beta that you're hopeful they fixed?